The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

Forget Your Health

Disclosure 111 ForgetYourHealth When you’re HIV positive you also know what it feels like to be HIV negative. You remember it. This HIV-­ negative, healthy body that was once yours is still somehow with you or near you but no longer you, not really. In fact, not unlike a younger age, it appears sometimes as if it were incarnated by others. Rosalyn Diprose reminds us of Maurice Merleau-­ Ponty’s distinction between remembering and forgetting,the former being a kind of figuration that allows us to distinguish the past from the present, the latter a way for the past to be concurrent with the present but without our having any perception of it.“But,” she adds,“memory and forgetting are ideal functions that change nothing. Rather, like the relation between truth and lies, there is a passage between memory and forgetting, forgetting and memory.” Diprose wrote these words as she reflected on the colonization of Australia and the harm done to Aboriginal populations, but I find them resonant here and in other contexts as well. Haunting, I believe, represents such a passage. It is a form of perception of the past that, if shapeless and essentially affective, nonetheless signals that the past and the present cannot be separated. In fact, I am tempted to say that the shapelessness of it—­ and of affect in general—­ signals that we are standing too close for comfort. When HIV-­ negative guys and I relate to one another, I see my past and they see their possible future. It isn’t particularly pleasant for me either—­ I do not look back on my healthier days with any particular fondness—­ but it is that or no relation at all. Poz guys whose treatment is working often describe themselves in online ads as“healthy,” a more appealing answer to“clean” and less technical a term than the paranoia-­ inducing“undetectable.” No doubt“healthy” is used in the hope that neg guys will not be scared away.In many cases they will be, though, just as sure as if you had described yourself as ravaged with oozing sores and purulent lesions. You might as well call yourself bubonic, frankly, it wouldn’t make any difference. The phrase healthy poz has no practical meaning because it relies not on objective medical facts but on a fantasy—­ health—­ that excludes us by definition. Although I am not“strictly” speaking sick (as of this writing), something in me keeps me from describing myself as healthy. First, I must affirm my solidarity with others who are in fact sick and dying of HIV disease. Second, it would suggest that there really isn’t much difference between having HIV and not having it. There may very well be more similarities than differences, but these differences do 112 Disclosure exist, and it would be illusory, and dishonest, to deny them. Third, there is much to gain from this doubling up of oneself as both healthy and sick. A friend told me once that he was a bit puzzled whenever I referred to myself sometimes as having AIDS rather than as merely being HIV positive . (I don’t really do it anymore; it’s just too over the top and no longer of any tactical help to me. Not that I have a problem with being over the top, far from it in fact, as the anger that pervades parts of this book may suggest, but I think that I have achieved everything I could hope to achieve that way in matters of HIV.) Given that the friend in question is about my age, this isn’t too surprising.Gay men of our generation remember the different stages of the epidemic and the importance of using certain terms rather than others, either as a matter of factual accuracy or to serve political needs. But once the treatments arrived, full-­ blown AIDS, as it was once called, was no longer a stage of no return in an inexorable process of degradation that led to death. Indeed, it became possible to return from it. Since I was at one point teetering on the fateful threshold of two hundred CD4 cells, the official boundary between having HIV and having AIDS, I too have returned. Yet to say that I no longer have AIDS would be absurd. I have AIDS, and the new treatments are keeping it in check for now. As a result of these new developments in care, the term HIV/AIDS became almost universally...